Tree of Smoke (68 page)

Dusk had come. Trung lay the bulky weapon on what was left of the mattress and lit the lantern and turned up the hissing gas so the wick flared white-hot.

“Mr. Jimmy. I go.”

The idea seemed to puzzle the sergeant deeply.

“I go out.”

“You’re going
out
?”

“I go. Yes.”

“Well, what’s on for tonight, man? Is there a mah-jongg tournament we just can’t miss? Because this is not the time for excursions.”

“Mr. Jimmy. I food. Hunger.”

“Stay here. I’ll go.”

“Stay here. I go.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“I come back.” Gingerly Trung pointed at the sergeant’s wristwatch. He moved his fingertip over its face to indicate thirty minutes. “I come back.”

“This is bullshit.”

“No, Jimmy.” A great storm of frustration brewed inside him. In Vietnamese he said, “I need to get out. I need to think. I need to breathe. I need to go. I need to move.” He seized the bulky weapon and reinserted the magazine, pulled the slide to bring a round into the chamber, ejected the magazine, loaded into it the spare round, and reinserted the magazine. Cradling the weapon in both hands, he presented it to Mr. Jimmy, who set it down on the mutilated bed before pointing at his watch.

“Thirty minutes?”

“You wait.”

The American took a billfold from his hip pocket and gave him several bills. “Get cigarettes. Marlboros. Real Marlboros.”

“You wait.”

“Real Marlboros. Don’t bring me no fake Marlboros.”

“Marlboros,” Trung assured him.

On the street Trung kept close to the buildings, but after crossing at the corner he walked openly. What use caution?

Hao had betrayed him.

Or Hao had saved him. Or both. Under the circumstances it wouldn’t get any clearer than that.

When he reached Anh Dung Street he stopped a vendor for a pack of Marlboros, the good ones. The American wanted the good ones, he understood that much.

In the café he sat at his usual table. It wasn’t the old Chinese man tonight. It was some woman instead, nearly as old, maybe the wife. “Noodles, please,” he said, but she shook her head. She didn’t speak Vietnamese.

All right—he didn’t see any noodles. Let it be rice again. He went to the counter and pointed to the kettle of rice on the stove, pointed above it to the teapots on a shelf. She nodded some kind of assent, and he took his chair again.

He watched people passing on the street. Surrounded by souls he didn’t know he woke to the world in its true scale, not a room with a window that looked at a wall, but an entire world in which he was lost. Whatever the details of the situation, whatever the nature of the problem, whoever had let him down, he was lost.

And to think how careful he’d been, and how pointlessly. It wasn’t that he regretted the mistake. He regretted the hesitation. Doubt is one thing, hesitation another. I waited three years to decide. I should have jumped. Doubt is the truth, hesitation a lie.

The old man came into the café. “You want two Coca-Cola? And the bread?”—his usual day’s supply. He didn’t suppose he needed it, if he was about to run. Run where? Where could he go? Once there, what would he do? And why wait around to ambush the assassin? Why not disappear quickly and fight another day? Mr. Jimmy recommends fighting now—insists on it. And who is Mr. Jimmy? By appearances, an ally. And on what basis to proceed, now, other than on the basis of appearances?

But Hao—enemy or ally? Trung doubted he would ever know.

The sergeant might know, but the two of them couldn’t communicate. This led him to think of Skip Sands with his terrible pronunciation, his phrase books and dictionaries, an American he could talk to. But for all he knew, Skip Sands had arranged this. The colonel was dead; perhaps his contacts had become liabilities and were being eliminated. To seek out Skip Sands was not advisable. To trust anyone on earth was ill-advised.

He felt the weight of innumerable griefs—but so many people had just as much to carry, and even more. But this one. This one was very lonely.

The old woman brought the bowl and a teapot, came back again with a teacup and two sauces. He smelled each decanter. One was hoisin. He poured it over the rice. No sticks. He waved his hand at her and rubbed two fingers together. She brought him lacquered sticks ornately decorated. Good luck, bad luck, but hunger visits each day. He bowed his head, lifted the bowl to his face, and fell to.

T
hough perfectly visible in the last light, Fest stood out front of the fabric shop without any pretense. Let them wonder why. Whatever happened, this was his last evening on the post.

If the target doesn’t go out by ten or so, after the cafés have closed, if I’m sure he isn’t leaving, if I can’t get inside to wait for the man—that’s it. I won’t go in at all.

He would instead go directly to the Armed Forces Language School and report his failure and demand extraction. And if the school was closed at night—if that contingency, like so many, had been overlooked—he’d go to the American Embassy and present Kenneth Johnson’s business card to the marine guard. If they turned him away he’d take a cab to Tan Son Nhut and wait there for the first plane going anywhere.

The darkness fell, the woman who ran the shop locked the door from within and turned out the light. She must spend her nights somewhere in the squalor of the building’s recesses. He stepped farther into the doorway, and he was hidden.

The street door to the rooming house opened fifteen minutes after nightfall, and the target headed diagonally across the street without keeping to the shadows. Fest waited until the man had rounded the corner and followed at a trot as he had the night before, and did the same at the next corner, when the man turned right to head, perhaps, for the same café. At the end of the block Fest couldn’t turn to follow—the man was stopped, talking to a street boy. Fest continued across the street, heading into the tide of honking motorbikes without pausing, as he’d learned to do. They knew how to keep from hitting pedestrians.

From the other side Fest looked back. The man was buying cigarettes or gum. Then he went on into the café.

Fest turned and made his way back to the street of the rooming house. At the first patch of darkness he came to he stopped and caught his breath. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his hands, replaced it in his back pocket, and repeated the process with a second handkerchief. He drew up his shirtfront and took the pistol from the belly holster and the suppressor from his front pocket and fixed them together and took the key from his left pocket and walked immediately to the building’s front door and opened it. Locking it behind him, he pocketed the key, took the other from his right-hand pocket, and proceeded up the stairs.

His hand in its wet envelope of heat inserts the key. He opens the door and removes the only assumption left: that in thirty-odd years of life he’s learned something that will be of help in this region where the grown-ups are all dead.

Inside, the lantern was burning. A shirtless man, a white man, unmistakably American, stood beside the bed holding out a rotund package.

He’d departed from his instructions. What had he done?

In English Fest said, “Excuse me.”

Simultaneously the entire building turned on its end. The hallway’s ceiling passed overhead, the stairs rushed up behind him and struck him in the back, the street door came to a stop upside down, hanging above him.

Blows struck his chest. He had a question, but he couldn’t draw a breath to ask it. The street door above him flew open, and a person was sucked up through it into the enormous darkness beyond. Something unbelievable began to suggest itself.

A
pproaching the corner of his street, Trung noticed a man on a motorbike stopped there, one foot on the pavement, his machine idling as he watched something over his shoulder, in the direction Trung himself was going. Trung rounded the corner cautiously.

In front of his building stood several men all shouting at once in Chinese. He stayed on the opposite side. In the first alley he passed, a few locals attended to small tasks with studious preoccupation. He saw no children among them. Down the block, more stopped motorbikes, people looking back at his own front door, which lay open. Among the men gathered around it he recognized the building’s owner.

He walked past rapidly, glancing across the street only once to see a man flung out on the stairwell as if he’d fallen backward, one arm twisted under him and the other reaching out behind. Trung had seen corpses. The man was dead.

The man wore a white shirt or perhaps a blue one, soaked now with blood.

As far as he remembered, Mr. Jimmy wore a bright flowered shirt and in any case had been bare-chested when Trung had left him.

He couldn’t risk slowing his pace to see better. He kept walking, absolutely without a destination.

S
ands sat at the dining table of a villa with its rent most probably in arrears, finishing a fine lunch prepared by servants he couldn’t pay, and considered that if he still had a job his salary would never find him. And that these were his smallest problems.

When he heard a vehicle in the road he stood up quickly. A white Chevrolet Impala stopped out front, Terry Crodelle at the wheel.

Crodelle rolled down the car’s front windows six inches or so, probably to let the breeze through, and got out. Today he wore civilian garb, including a yellow cardigan sweater, and he carried a briefcase which he switched from hand to hand while removing the sweater and tossing it onto the front seat and kicking shut the driver’s door. Sands watched him coming alone through the gate and considered that from the loneliest outpost on earth Cao Quyen had become the Crossroads of the Far East. In his manner of mounting the granite step onto the porch, clutching his briefcase, and peering at the house, Crodelle projected some of the doubt and hope of an insurance salesman.

As Sands pulled aside the netting for him, all uncertainty dropped from Crodelle’s face. Immediately inside he stopped. “The prey in his lair.”

“You want a drink or something?”

“Put me where there’s a breeze.”

“There’s a veranda out back, but I think it’s still getting the sun right now.”

“Right here’s just fine.”

In the parlor Crodelle set his briefcase on the coffee table and sat down in one of the big rattan chairs. “Maybe a large glass of cold water. I don’t want to lose my cool.”

“Reassuring news.”

Sands went to the kitchen and found Mrs. Diu seated on a stool with her feet on the rungs shelling snow peas into the lap of her skirt and tossing the rinds in a galvanized tub. That’s the kind of work he wanted. “Will you make us some tea and sandwiches, please?” She scooped the peas from her lap onto the counter while Sands poured a big glass of water from a pitcher in the fridge. Dread weakened his hands. Water splashed on the tiles.

Crodelle didn’t look over his shoulder as Sands came back into the parlor to sit facing him.

“What’s in the briefcase, Terry? A tape recorder?”

“Better than that.”

“A super-miniature polygraph?”

Crodelle gave him the finger.

“You found me. Excellent work.”

“You’ve got snitchy friends.”

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“Nice place.”

“It’s haunted.”

“It feels like it. Yeah. A little.—Jesus, Skip, what happened to your ear?”

“I got beat up.”

Crodelle sat back in his chair and crossed ankle over knee. “You’re an interesting character. I should have been visiting you a lot more often. And there’s a sense of quiet here.”

“I try not to move around and break a sweat. There’s no air conditioner.”

“Rick Voss went down in a helicopter. He’s dead.”

“I know. It’s terrible.”

“Thanks for your sympathy.”

Quite against his will, Sands heaved a quavering sigh. “What about Hao? Dead too?”

“Nguyen Hao? Not quite.”

“Listen to me, please. If he’s your guy, you’d better look out for him.”

“Hao does a hell of a job looking out for himself. A hell of a job.”

“He isn’t safe, Terry, I mean it.”

“Hao and his wife are on their way out of the country.”

“Wow. No. Are you serious?”

“What’s serious is that Rick Voss is dead. He was on his way to see you in Cao Phuc. Now he’s dead.”

Sands had no idea what to say. The pulse in his battered ear tormented him. The kettle began whistling in the kitchen. “So I pack up and we go?”

“More or less.”

“Why don’t you have a couple embassy marines with you?”

“It’s not a pick-up. If you had a phone, I could’ve just called you and invited you in. Look, Skip,” Crodelle said, “I’d like you to send the servants home.”

“Their home is about sixty feet away.”

“Just so we have some privacy.”

“Their home is a little building right out the back door.”

Crodelle merely stared at him.

“Can we get some tea and sandwiches first? She’s making them now. Are you hungry?”

“Sure.”

“They’re good. She cuts the crust off.”

“Just like the Continental.”

“Yeah, man. You can get crust if you want it—”

“No, thanks.”

Mrs. Diu was already bringing the plate of sandwiches. Skip leapt up and went to get the tea. When Mrs. Diu joined him in the kitchen he said, “Now I’d like you to take the rest of the afternoon off.”

“Off?”

“Yes, please. We need the house to ourselves.”

“You want me to leave?”

“Yes, just—to the house. I’m sorry, just go home.”

“You don’t want me to clean the lunch?”

“Maybe later.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll clean it up.”

“Okay.”

“It was very good.”

She left by the back door. Sands placed the sugar bowl, spoons, two cups, and the teapot on a tray with handles too small for his fingers and brought it all into the parlor to find Crodelle staring at his plate of crustless sandwiches. He hadn’t touched them. “It’s just the local tea,” Skip said. “No milk today.”